Stage(d) Hands in early modern drama and culture Imogen Lydia Felstead B.A, M.A This thesis is submitted in partial fulfilment of the requirements of the degree of Doctor of Philosophy Department of English Literature and Creative Writing Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Lancaster University February 2020 Abstract This thesis offers the first full phenomenological study of the staging of hands in early modern drama and culture by analysis of selected canonical and non- canonical plays (1550-1650) in dialogue with significant non-dramatic intertexts. Reading plays by Shakespeare, Webster, Middleton, Rowley, Tomkis, Marlowe, Heywood, Brome, Jonson and Dekker, I argue the hand constructs subjectivity, materially and psychologically, in the natural, built and social landscapes represented on stage and experienced in the early modern world. This argument is supported through broad-ranging interdisciplinary analysis shaped by first-hand experience following an injury to my right hand. The introduction situates the hand within anthropological, materialist and phenomenological critical approaches to argue its functions as an ‘extroceptive’ tool. I explore Merleau-Ponty’s notion of the body as a natural instrument of expression, which registers and defines the individual’s spatial being-in-the-world. I position the hand as a self-defining agent as understood by: Nancy’s work on thinking the body ‘anew’; Derrida’s analysis of the hand as ‘maker’; the history of technicity and exteriorisation in the works of Stiegler and Leroi-Gourhan alongside medical practices surrounding my own contemporary experience. Chapter One analyses the active hand, conventionally gendered masculine, as a symbol of human mind and spirit materialised with reference to ‘intentionality’. I argue the staged hand, a cognitive symbol that constitutes the body schema, is the most pivotal body part on the early modern stage, cultivating and developing the subject’s expressive and symbolic relationship with the world. Bulwer’s Chirologia and Chironomia (1644) informs this chapter to demonstrate tactual perception to be the centre of early modern corporeality and hapticity to be indispensable to sensory experience. Chapter Two considers the feminine hand as an object staged by boys and passed between men alongside Merleau-Ponty’s notion of intercorporeity, to suggest that the feminine hand is situated within a paradox. Both passive and objectified, it is a powerful source of autonomy, command and agency, as embodied by Elizabeth I. I argue that the potential for agency turns the active helping hand into an instrument of disorder and empowerment which creates a space for independent desires and actions. Chapter Three considers the body without the hand and the hand without the body using Merleau-Ponty’s understanding of the body schema with respect to phantom limb syndrome and anosognosia alongside my own experience at Wessex Rehabilitation Centre. I argue the phantom limb phenomenon is a recurrent transhistorical feature in early modern drama and culture and represents cultural anxieties of fragmentation, loss and disruption. Table of Contents TEXTUAL CONVENTIONS AND ABBREVIATIONS 1 PRIMARY SOURCES 1 LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS 2 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 4 INTRODUCTION THE INSTRUMENT OF INSTRUMENTS 5 EARLY MODERN HANDS AND IDENTITIES 11 EARLY MODERN BODIES AND MINDS 20 EARLY MODERN HAND STUDIES 25 A HANDS-ON UNDERSTANDING OF PHENOMENOLOGY 29 THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK 33 MOTOR/BODY INTENTIONALITY 37 HABITUAL/PRESENT BODY 38 HANDS OF THE ACTOR AND SPECTATOR 43 EXTERIORISATION AND CO-EXISTENCE 48 HANDS MAKING SELVES 50 TECHNICITY 52 PHANTOM LIMB SYNDROME 53 CHAPTER ONE THE ACTIVE HAND 63 GESTURE AND ACTING 64 THE DIVINE DIGIT: HAND-MADE HUMANS 72 ON THE OTHER HAND 84 COUNTING AND MAKING: HANDS SHAPING THE PHYSICAL WORLD 89 HANDWORK 97 THE W(RIGHT)ING HAND 101 CHAPTER TWO DOUBLE SENSATION 108 COMMUNION, CO-EXISTENCE, COMMUNITY 112 GIVE ME YOUR HAND 125 THE FEMININE HAND ON STAGE 133 FEMININE HANDS AS ACTIVE AGENTS 142 PEN, INK AND PAPER 161 CHAPTER THREE THE HAND WITHOUT THE BODY AND THE BODY WITHOUT THE HAND 166 DISMEMBERMENT AND PHANTOM LIMBS 167 MY PHANTOM LIMB 173 THE MARTIAL HAND: DISMEMBERMENT, RESTORATION AND REVENGE 180 THE MARITAL HAND: SACRIFICE, SEPARATION AND SUBVERSION 208 CONCLUSION 240 APPENDIX 1 (DATA) 245 BIBLIOGRAPHY 249 Felstead 1 Textual conventions and abbreviations All biblical references are to The King James Bible (London, 1611) OED – The Oxford English Dictionary Primary sources All references to Shakespeare’s texts are to William Shakespeare, The Norton Shakespeare, Second Edition ed. by Stephen Greenblatt, Walter Cohen, Jean E. Howard and Katharine Maus (Oxford: W.W. Norton & Company, 2008) All references to the main play texts are to Act, Scene and lines in the following editions: Thomas Dekker, The Shoemaker’s Holiday or The Gentle Craft (1600), ed. by D.J. Palmer (London: Ernest Benn Limited, 1975) Thomas Dekker, The Honest Whore Part One (1604), ed. by Nick de Somogyi (London: Nick Hern Books, 1998) Thomas Dekker and Thomas Middleton, The Roaring Girl (1611), ed. by James Knowles and Eugene Giddens (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001) Edmund Ironside in Shakespeare’s Edmund Ironside: The Lost Play (1587), ed. by Eric Sams (Hants: Fourth Estate Ltd, 1985) Thomas Heywood and Richard Brome, The Late Lancashire Witches (1634), ed. by Gabriel Egan (London: Nick Hern Books, 2002) Ben Jonson, Epicoene or The Silent Woman (1609), ed. by Roger Holdsworth (New York: W.W. Norton & Company Inc., 1979) Christopher Marlowe, Doctor Faustus A- and B- texts (1604, 1616), ed. by David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993) Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, The Changeling (1622), ed. by George Walton Williams (London: Arnold, 1967) Selimus, Emperor of the Turks in Three Turk Plays from Early Modern England (1594), ed. by Daniel J. Vitkus (New York: Columbia University Press, 2000) Thomas Tomkis, Albumazar: A comedy presented before the Kings Maiestie at Cambridge, the ninth of March. 1614. By the Gentlemen of Trinitie Colledge. (London: Printed by Nicholas Okes for Walter Burre, and are to be sold at his Shop, in Pauls Church-yard, 1615) John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi (1614), ed. by John Russell Brown (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1997) Felstead 2 List of illustrations Figure 1: Mike Felstead, Imogen’s hand (2020) [Photograph].................................................. 5 Figure 2: William Marshall, ‘An Alphabet of the Natural Gestures of the Hand’ in John Bulwer’s Chirologia (1644) [Engraving]. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC. ...................................................................................... 5 Figure 3: Josephine Pryde, Hands “Für Mich” (2016) [Photograph]. Turner Prize 2016, Tate Britain. ..................................................................................................................................... 10 Figure 4: W. Penfield and T. Rasmussen ‘The sensory homunculus’ ..................................... 32 Figure 5: Alexa Wright, ‘RD’, After Image (1997) [digitally manipulated colour C Type prints (56 x 75 cm) unframed (mounted on aluminium); small text panels] London, The Wellcome Trust. ....................................................................................................................... 56 Figure 6: William Marshall, An Alphabet of the Natural Gestures of the Hand (1644) [Engraving]. Rare Book and Special Collections Division, Library of Congress, Washington DC. ........................................................................................................................................... 66 Figure 7: George Wither, ‘Illustration III’ Book.1 (1635) [Engraving]. ................................. 77 Figure 8: Anonymous, Pacioli’s Finger-Reckoning System (1494) [Woodcut]. The Walters Art Gallery, Baltimore, Maryland ............................................................................................ 92 Figure 9: Angela Felstead modelling Pacilio’s finger-reckoning system. Hand gesture ‘one’. .................................................................................................................................................. 93 Figure 10: Hand gesture ‘ten’. ................................................................................................. 93 Figure 11: Hand gesture ‘one hundred’. .................................................................................. 93 Figure 12: Hand gesture ‘one thousand’. ................................................................................. 93 Figure 13: Giacomo Franco, Del Franco Modo di Scivere (1596) [Engraving]. Victoria and Albert Picture Library, London.............................................................................................. 105 Figure 14: Jacob Cats, Silenus Alcibiadis Sive Proteus (1618) [Engraving.] ........................ 106 Figure 15: Limbourg Brothers, Saint Paul the Hermit witnessing a Christian Tempted (1408) (detail) The Belles Heures of Jean de France, Duke de Bery [Tempera colours and gold on parchment]. The Cloisters Collection, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York. ................ 118 Figure 16: Jan Saenredam, Touch (1596) [Engraving]. Rosenwald Collection, National Gallery of Art, Washington D.C. ........................................................................................... 120 Figure 17: Pair of embroidered gloves with long extended fingers c. 1595-1605.